Growth, Interrupted

When We Need More Than Just Data: The Communication Skills Driving Growth in Paid Media

Paid media has never had more data. More signals, more dashboards, more attribution models than any team knows what to do with. And yet the most important decisions, the ones that shape budgets, clients, careers, still come down to a conversation. A pitch. A moment in a room where someone has to actually move another person to act.

In this episode of Growth, Interrupted, we ask the question the industry rarely makes time for: what does it actually take to communicate, persuade, and lead in performance-driven marketing, and is poor communication quietly one of the most underrated obstacles to growth?

What You'll Learn: Influence, Storytelling & Negotiation in Advertising

This conversation covers the full arc of human communication in paid media, from the dynamics of client–agency relationships to the role of storytelling in a data-heavy world, from negotiation frameworks that go far beyond the back-and-forth of budget conversations, to the communication habits that hold even the most talented leaders back from the next level.

You'll hear why the best argument in the room doesn't always win. Why committing to a decision is always partly an emotional act, even in organisations that run entirely on metrics. Why framing is a tool, but trust is the strategy. And why the brands that build real influence with their audiences are doing something that no dashboard can fully measure.

We also go deep on what AI actually changes for the humans in the room. Not the headlines about generative AI, but the quieter, more consequential shift in what skills matter, what becomes less important, and what the leaders who thrive in an AI-driven environment will need to do differently.

About the Guest: Leadership & Communication Research Meets Industry Practice

Our guest this episode, Jesse Scinto, brings a perspective that's genuinely rare in paid media conversations. With nearly 14 years at Columbia University, where he teaches graduate courses on leadership, influence, and critical conversations, and years before that advising organisations like Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, and Deloitte on communication and persuasion, he sits at the intersection of academic rigour and real-world practice.

He's also the founder of the Winter Symposium and runs an executive coaching practice helping senior leaders develop the kind of presence and storytelling ability that actually moves rooms.

Growth, Interrupted is hosted by Amy Tran, Senior Director of Growth at Crealytics, and is sponsored by Crealytics, an award-winning digital marketing agency specialising in retail, ecommerce, and full-funnel paid media.

Keywords: paid media leadership, marketing communication, influence in advertising, storytelling in marketing, negotiation for marketers, DTC marketing strategy, performance marketing leadership, AI in advertising, client-agency relationships, growth marketing podcast

Retention Is the New Growth: Lifecycle Marketing and the Long Game

What if your most valuable growth asset isn't your next campaign, but the customers you already have?

When the market shifts, who stays?

When COVID hit, EILEEN FISHER's stores closed overnight. No foot traffic, no walk-ins. But their most loyal customers didn't disappear. They came back online, and they came back fast. That wasn't luck. That was a lifecycle marketing program doing exactly what it's supposed to do: making a business shockproof.

In this episode of Growth, Interrupted, Amy Tran sits down with Harika Sukhwinder, Senior Director of Performance Marketing and CRM at EILEEN FISHER, for a conversation about what it actually takes to build customer relationships that survive the disruptions: a pandemic, a tough season, rising tariffs, shifting consumer behavior.

What lifecycle marketing really looks like in practice

Harika has spent six and a half years inside one of retail's most intentional brands, and what she's built doesn't look like a traditional retailer's playbook. At EILEEN FISHER, less is more: fewer emails, deeper segmentation, and a customer who might shop once a quarter but rebuilds her entire wardrobe when she does. They talk about how to structure a CRM program across new, active, lapsing, and reactivated customers, and why win-back strategy looks completely different when your brand runs on depth rather than frequency.

They also get into the mechanics: how first-party data flows between CRM and paid search, why paid media isn't just an acquisition channel, the honest reality of attribution (last touch, DDA, incrementality, and why none of it is solved), and what it actually takes to get leadership to invest in lifecycle programs when the payoff shows up in years, not quarters.

The long game: CLV, data infrastructure, and meaningful growth

CLV is the north star, but what sits alongside it? Harika breaks down the full measurement picture: database health, retention rates, shopping frequency, and the short-term signals that buy you the runway for long-term investment. She also shares what she'd do differently if she started EILEEN FISHER's lifecycle program from scratch, and why getting your data infrastructure right from day one is the single most important thing any marketer can do.

This is a conversation about growth that goes well beyond the next conversion. Because at EILEEN FISHER, growth means something specific: meaningful, sustainable, and built to last, just like the products.

Growth, Interrupted is produced and sponsored by Crealytics, an award-winning digital marketing agency.

Why Your Ad Strategy Might Already Be Three Eras Behind

There's a moment in this episode where Stephanie Boedige, a decade into Microsoft Advertising, now Global Agency Director for Independent Agencies, says something that quietly reframes the entire conversation: marketers today aren't optimizing for one internet, they're optimizing for three. The human web. The LLM web. The agentic web. Each with its own rules for what "getting found" even means. Amy and Stephanie dig into what happens to performance marketing when AI stops summarizing options and starts completing tasks on a shopper's behalf, and why some of Microsoft's own funnel data on Copilot-assisted journeys might make you rethink where your next quarter's budget actually belongs.

Agentic Commerce, MCP, and the New Rules of Agency-Platform Trust

This is also, at its core, an episode about partnership, the kind Stephanie has spent years building between Microsoft and independent agencies across Europe and beyond. What does an "AI maturity framework" actually look like in practice? What did Microsoft's MCP beta, announced fresh off Cannes Lions, unlock for agentic commerce? And when it comes to first-party data, data cleanrooming, and the caution many European advertisers still carry, where's the workaround that doesn't compromise the data? Stephanie doesn't stay vague. She names the skills, the tools, and the tensions agencies need to sit with right now.

The Question Every Growth Leader Should Be Asking About Automation

Every episode of Growth, Interrupted comes home to its own question, and this one lands somewhere worth sitting with: trust, authenticity, and differentiation don't automate, and Stephanie has strong opinions about what platforms owe agencies in return for that trust. A candid, insider's conversation about where digital advertising is actually going, from someone who's spent a decade inside the machinery watching it happen.Key terms mentioned in this episode:

• MCP (Model Context Protocol): The Microsoft Advertising Model Context Protocol (MCP) server connects Microsoft Advertising data and actions directly to AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT — enabling real-time performance insights, campaign management, and automated multi-account audits using natural language.

• DCR (Data Collection Rules): In Microsoft Advertising and the wider Microsoft cloud ecosystem, DCR typically refers to Data Collection Rules — cloud configuration files used in back-end tracking, infrastructure monitoring, and ad assessments, particularly relevant for advertisers managing Microsoft Advertising at an enterprise level or linking it with Azure.

Growth, Interrupted is brought to you by Crealytics. Keywords: AI advertising, Microsoft Advertising, agentic commerce, the agentic web, AI search, Microsoft Copilot, MCP (Model Context Protocol), first-party data, data cleanrooming, performance marketing, independent agencies, digital marketing strategy, growth marketing

What Is Agentic Commerce, and Is Your Product Data Ready for It?

AI is changing how consumers discover, research, and buy. But while brands rush to understand agentic commerce, most are missing the part that actually matters: the product data sitting underneath every interaction. In this episode of Growth, Interrupted, host Amy Tran sits down with Marcel Hollabach, Co-Founder and CIO at Productsup, the enterprise feed management platform trusted by brands like PUMA, Thalia, and Thule across 170+ global markets, to unpack what agentic commerce really means, what's already happening versus what's still hype, and why your product catalog is fast becoming your most important sales asset.

From Google Shopping to LLMs: Why Your Feed Is Your Sales Pitch

Marcel and Amy dig into how product discovery is shifting from keyword search to goal-based shopping, and what that means for how brands structure their feeds. Marcel explains why winning Google still means winning the wider ecosystem (including ChatGPT, which pulls product results directly from Google Shopping), what OpenAI's new catalog spec is doing differently, and why richer product attributes, think themes, use cases, Q&A content, will define visibility in AI-led environments. They also get into the debate around agentic checkout: why Walmart launched it, why they quietly sunsetted it, and what that tells us about where the real commercial opportunity actually lies.

The One Competitive Edge Left When AI Is Doing the Bidding

When every brand is running Performance Max and the AI is optimising bids for everyone, what's left to differentiate? Marcel's answer: your catalog. In the closing segment, he shares why brands that treat product data like a performance channel, testing, iterating, improving, will pull ahead, while those running on status quo feeds will decline. They also cover the Universal Commerce Protocol versus OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, why being too early can be as costly as being too late, and the one data investment Marcel says is always worth making — regardless of timing.

Growth, Interrupted is brought to you by Crealytics. Keywords: agentic commerce, product feed optimisation, AI-driven discovery, Google Shopping, Performance Max, LLM commerce, product data strategy, e-commerce growth, retail media, feed management.

What does it actually take to be a great account strategist in paid media, not just a good one?

In this episode of Growth, Interrupted, host Amy Tran sits down with Ally Basner, currently YouTube Product Lead at Google with eight years of experience partnering with some of the world's largest retail and DTC brands. Ally brings a rare inside-Google perspective on what separates strategists who execute from those who truly drive growth.

They get into the mindset shift that most people miss early in their careers, and why platform expertise alone will only take you so far. Ally shares what it really means to think like a business owner, how to challenge a client's ROAS target without damaging the relationship, and why curiosity might be the most underrated skill in performance marketing today.

On the DTC and retail side, Ally unpacks how to work with margin-sensitive businesses, what most brands get wrong in the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and how to avoid the trap of running what she calls "a really optimised decline."

The conversation also gets into client relationships, the difference between being liked and being trusted, why saying yes to everything is a fast track to burnout, and how to push back in a way that actually strengthens a partnership. Plus: the platform-agency dynamic, what Google really wants from agency partners, and how AI is changing the day-to-day of the strategist role.

Ally closes with what she sees as the biggest career growth blockers, including the "expert trap" and an aversion to risk that quietly stalls careers before people even realise it.

If you work in paid media, performance marketing, or account strategy, whether at an agency, brand, or platform, this one is worth your time.

Topics covered: account strategy, DTC marketing, retail media, Google Ads, paid search, performance marketing, client relationships, ROAS, unit economics, Black Friday strategy, agency-platform collaboration, AI in marketing, career development in adtech.

Growth, Interrupted is brought to you by Crealytics — an award-winning global digital marketing agency specialising in retail, e-commerce, and full-funnel paid media.

This is the episode where it all starts.

Growth, Interrupted is a podcast about what's actually driving growth in DTC and retail today, and what's getting in the way.

ROAS has been the default answer for too long. Incrementality is finally being taken seriously. And in the AI era, where automation is doing more of the work, the attribution question has gotten even harder to answer with confidence.

This show exists for the CMOs, performance leads, and growth operators who are done optimising for metrics that look good on paper but don't hold up in the boardroom.

Your host: Amy Tran, Senior Director of Growth at Crealytics, with 9+ years in paid media across North America and EMEA.

Growth, Interrupted is brought to you by Crealytics — an award-winning global digital marketing agency with over 15 years of deep expertise in retail, e-commerce, and full-funnel paid media.